I suspect that like a lot of heavy Internet surfers, I've been spending huge chunks of productive time obsessively going to sites that add little to my productivity.

Actually, I know I have, it's just that I'm afraid to do a real time audit on what percentage of my days this actiivty has gnawed out of my life.

So I deleted at least half of my favorites from the browser, and am going cold turkey on anything that doesn't add to what I'm actually supposed to be doing.

Of course, I am excepting Blogcritics from this, because there are plenty of posts where I can learn something, or pick up on things that are helpful. News sites are also exempted, because a healthy news diet does contribute to what I'm doing.

But many things don't — for example, I had a habit of checking Romenesko's at Poynter Online several times a day, "to keep up on the media business," I told myself.

But that was an excuse — most of the site is simple gossip — a running blog of wrongdoings and so-called developments that do nothing to advance my career. Instead, what it did was give me a false sense of involvement in the larger media world. I was fooling myself — the only way to be part of something, for real, is to contribute actual work. Not just being able to talk about it, which is nothing but shallow factoid possession.

Deleting the sites is already making me feel cleaner, like after a haircut or a trip to the dentist.

What I've become interested in lately — after hours of surfing and saying to myself, there's nothing on, are sites that are constructive. Teach me something I don't know, point me to information or skills that I would do well to acquire, show me how to become more of the person I want to be.

This doesn't mean the stuff I elect to read has to be high-falutin'. For example, I've been doing some construction and landscaping projects, and have found a few sites that traffic in how-to information. Stuff as simple as germinating seeds or how to use an arc welder.

It just seems the Internet was made for more than gossip.